1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device, a method, and a program for transmitting image data via a network, as well as a computer readable recording medium stored with said program.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the popularization of various information equipment such as personal computers (hereinafter simply called “computers”) and portable terminals, the amount of information each person is receiving or monitoring is increasing year by year. At the same time, the format of information is shifting from information on paper to electronic data, and the methods of information delivery such as circulation, distribution and display are being replaced by electronic data means.
For example, a method of distributing to each user an electronic data obtained by scanning a paper document by a scanner by attaching it to an electronic mail (e-mail) is well known. However, such an electronic data obtained by scanning a document is essentially an image data so that it has generally a very large volume. As a result, an electronic data, which is an image data obtained by scanning a document, tends to cause a problem that such an electronic data requires not only a long time to process but also a large storage capacity to store. For example, when an e-mail attached with an image data file, which typically has a large volume, is transmitted, it requires a long time for transmission and heavily tasks the mail server that stores it from the capacity standpoint. Moreover, if the mail server has a limitation for the data size of e-mail in order to alleviate its capacity load, there is a chance that it may reject transmitted e-mail.
In order to solve this problem, Unexamined Publication No. JP-A-10-233860 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,526) discloses a method that stores such an image data at a database server and simultaneously notifies the user on the e-mail that the image data is stored including the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that indicates the location of said image data. This method enables the user to download the image data based on the URL to display or store on the user's computer as needed.
However, the prior art disclosed by above-mentioned publication had a shortcoming that an e-mail notifying the storage of the image data provides only limited amount information to the user concerning the contents of the image data. In other words, although such an e-mail notifying the storage of the image data includes information such as the sender's comment, transmitting source location and transmitting date, etc., the only information it carries concerning the image data is the URL that indicates the location of the storage. Therefore, the only way available for the e-mail's receiver to confirm the contents of the image data was to download the image data based on the URL. Therefore, the problem that unnecessary image data is transmitted to the destination consuming a lot of data transmission time and data storage volume at the destination was essentially left unsolved.